So, what was the purpose and use of "reveal codes" in WP? The reason has
always been explained to me as a method to deal with character property
changes when the user could not figure out where they were occurring and
then remove them. In WP, I vaguely remember that it was possible to have
tags to start and stop bold with no characters between them, and other
odd things. I don't remember if I could have something really strange like
<bold></bold><bold></bold>
or
<bold></bold><italic></italic>
With no text, just lots of confusion. I could be mistaken, but, I think
that the advantage of reveal codes was that you could find oddities such
as this and remove them and you had no other method of dealing with it.
In WP, when you reveal the codes, you can then move through them and
individual delete them. Note that the macro that exists today only
allows a certain level of visualization with no deletion capabilities.
There are multiple reasons that this functionality has never been
integrated into AOO. I even considered writing one myself, but then I
started to think about exactly what this would or should do in the
context of AOO and how it works. For example, lets assume that you see
some text that is bold. To someone unfamiliar with how styles work in
AOO, the first assumption is that it should simply show you every place
that a character property changes. Seems simple enough. It is probably
worth knowing that character property changed. For a simple example,
consider bold text. How does one make text bold in a text document?
1. Hard code a property change by selecting the text and marking it as bold.
2. Set the "font effects" in a character style and apply the character
style to the text.
3. In a paragraph style, set the Font Style to Bold.
What do you see in the "Reveal Codes 2" macro? I am looking at it now.
1. You see all style changes it seems. So, you can know that style
changed, but not that the style set the font to be bold.
2. When I manually set some text to be bold, what it really shows as the
CharWeight, CharWeightComplex, and CharWeightAsian property is set to
150. This is far more fine grained and useful than Bold on and Bold off
(I can indicate how bold it is or is not). setting to 100 internally is
normal. 150 is bold. You can set it higher or lower I believe.
Clearly I don't really understand what I am looking at because it looks
like it does not nicely show when things start and end, but it looks
more like when it starts and then when something else starts (for the
bold), and when I click on what I thought should be having "bold" stop,
it set the rest of the text bold. Probabl a bug, but I do not know the
intention. Then again, it might be a bug that I introduced with one of
my "fixes"
Looks like Reveal codes 3 handles this better. Oh, I see now.... the
button with "CharWeight: 150>" is where it starts and "<CharWeight: 150"
is where it ends. Not how I would have represented it, but I am more
likely to think of it in terms of XML notation with "<CharWeight: 150 >"
to start and "</CharWeight: 150 >" to end.
Version 2 has the ability to then move around through the document with
buttons, 3 does not. 3 has some dialogs for configuration, 2 does not.
Ian Laurenson wrote these back in 2004.
So, if I set the character to be bold in a character style or a
paragraph style, you would never know since that is not specifically
enumerated, just that the style has changed, not what it changed.
On 06/27/2015 08:18 AM, elderdanlewis wrote:
Yes, it does. Then again, it makes me wonder how great reveal codes are.
If it were important to many people, shouldn't someone who used them regularly
have kept the extension up to date? It would take some time to learn how to do
this though.
In this case, the person who stated that it should be part of OO should "bite
the bullet," learn how to create the extension, and do so. Then he/she should keep
it up to date.
It might prove how important reveal codes really are by the number of
downloads of this extension.
Dan
--
Andrew Pitonyak
My Macro Document: http://www.pitonyak.org/AndrewMacro.odt
Info: http://www.pitonyak.org/oo.php
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